Survation finds dramatic LAB collapse in Scotland but not on the scale of Ipsos-MORI in October
What we need now are Scottish constituency polls
The second part of the Daily Record Survation poll of Scottish voters was published overnight and finds a big increase in SNP support since the IndyRef with an even bigger drop in the Labour share.
It doesn’t really need to be said that the prospect of losing a significant part of its current base of 41 seats North of the border is going to make Labour’s challenge at the General Election that much harder.
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On some computations these latest numbers would leave Scottish LAB with just five seats out of the 41 it currently has.
That might sound an awful lot but it is far better than the same calculations that were being made three weeks age when the Ipsos-MORI quarterly Scottish poll had the SNP on 52% with LAB on 23%. Then the talk was of just one Scottish LAB MP remaining.
So in one sense today’s Survation poll could have been worse for LAB. It wasn’t as bad as Ipsos-MORI.
The best way of working out the impact in terms of seats is through single constituency polling which Lord Ashcroft had said he had in the pipeline. He asks a two stage voting question with the second requesting those sampled to focus on the specifics of their own seats. And as we have seen this can make a big difference.
One thing of course to bear in mind is that the loss by Labour of Scottish seats to the SNP has no impact on the Tory ambition of winning an overall majority. That requires the blues to win seats not LAB to lose them to another party.
As I wrote yesterday full Scottish polls have been something of a rarity since the IndyRef. This is just the third so we have not got too much data to base things on. But all three surveys have pointed to catastrophic LAB losses the only differences between on the scale of what might happen.
And to reiterate Lord Ashcroft’s regular caveat – polls are a snapshot not a prediction.